Uzodinma Iweala Quotes

The notion of 'we' is very important. I think, for any family, any community to be able to say 'we' in this family, it means something. It's dangerous to society when somebody will place himself or herself on the outside of 'we.'

I can't tell you how much I love Target and Costco, that kind of culture, because it's something I never felt a part of. I've always felt like a tourist because I have never fit in anywhere.

We can think of solutions in various theoretical ways, but it's not so on the ground. If they don't have a reference that helps them to belong, then they will end up excluding, and through that they get to feel that they belong on the basis of some narrow identity, language or color.

You have to be really careful to watch out for the difference between banding together, and being grouped together by people who don't understand you.

People have asked me about playing outsiders. I don't consider myself an outsider. Maybe that's why I'm interested in that. I'm not really sure.

Toronto is a very multicultural city, a place of immigrants, like my parents.

Every human being has to feel a part of a tribe. It's programmed into us. And you have to feel that you're contributing to something.

Culture is something that we all share, and we are all the poorer for anyone excluded from it.

Jews have had to carry around their own sense of self in a carpet bag and I think perhaps too much emphasis might be being put on nationality and on the other hand patriotism, that sort of thing.

All the people like us are we, and everyone else is They.

Sports teams, people who follow sports teams, religion, churches, work - any company, I find that people just generally have a need to belong to something larger than themselves.

I am fully present wherever I am. Why bother being in a community or neighborhood and not being fully present? I think that's colonization. I'm not interested in that.

When I was a kid... I needed to belong.

As a kid I had all kinds of questions about how I fit it with my neighborhood and friends and other Latinos.

As soon as you say that there is a community called, let's say, black Americans, you've immediately created a boundary line - who's in that group, who's outside that group.

We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs.

I'm lucky because I have so many clashing cultural, racial things going on: black, Jewish, Irish, Portuguese, Cherokee. I can float and be part of any community I want.

The essential dilemma of my life is between my deep desire to belong and my suspicion of belonging.

Every human being has an assortment of diverse identities, and it greatly matters which one is triggered by social situations, which hold up different kinds of mirrors. The same is true for nations.

I'm Puerto Rican, but I represent everybody.

I have a big thing about needing to know that I belong - in my group of friends, in my family, in my industry.

It is important to recognize that folklore is not simply a way of obtaining available date about identity for social scientists; it is actually one of the principal means by which an individual and a group discovers or establishes his or its identity.

The black community is my community - the LGBT community, too, and the female community. That is my community. That's me; it's who I am.

Thinking of ourselves as members of 'this group' or 'that group,' I think that's a recipe for division.

I felt like I was an outsider growing up in the black church, as a gay man, in a poor community.